Salient Region Detection by UFO: Uniqueness, Focusness and Objectness

The goal of saliency detection is to locate important pixels or regions in an image which attract humans' visual attention the most. This is a fundamental task whose output may serve as the basis for further computer vision tasks like segmentation, resizing, tracking and so forth. In this paper we propose a novel salient region detection algorithm by integrating three important visual cues namely uniqueness, focusness and objectness (UFO). In particular, uniqueness captures the appearance-derived visual contrast; focusness reflects the fact that salient regions are often photographed in focus; and objectness helps keep completeness of detected salient regions. While uniqueness has been used for saliency detection for long, it is new to integrate focusness and objectness for this purpose. In fact, focusness and objectness both provide important saliency information complementary of uniqueness. In our experiments using public benchmark datasets, we show that, even with a simple pixel level combination of the three components, the proposed approach yields significant improvement compared with previously reported methods.